Please comment on these generalizations.
Does everyone agree with them or are there some that you take issue with.
They were written by Prof. Chris Upward (Aston U., UK). Upward was a major
contributor to The Oxford Companion to the English Language (Tom McArthur, editor).

I have added my initialed comments in this reposting. Feel free to do the same.

source page: http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/n/n5pt1.php

Ten Axioms on English Spelling
Edited and expanded by Chris Upward



1. Alphabets provide the simplest way to write most languages.

SB: syllabaries are strong contenders when there are less than 5 vowels.
ref: www.omniglot.com, www.wikipedia.com keyword: syllabary

2. The alphabet works by the principle that letters represent speech sounds.

SB: Most writing systems contain more than just sound signs.
They also include a few meaning signs (semagrams, word-signs, logograms).

3. Literacy is easily acquired if the spelling tells readers the pronunciation, and the pronunciation tells writers the spelling.

SB: Literacy is more easily acquired under these conditions. In fact illiterates can learn highly phonemic writing systems in 3 months or less. Laubach (1960) said that 3 months was the average for 95% of the 300 languages his organization developed literacy materials for. Swadesh and Pike (1939) claimed to have taught illiterate Indians in rural Mexico how to read and write their own language and Spanish in two months.

Kalmar says that a hybrid Tarascan /tə'raas kən / alphabet had been devised in 1939 by Swadesh, Lathrop, and Pike, as part of the Tarascan Project. (p.108) "The Tarascan Project became the showpiece of adult biliteracy campaigns ... elevated [by UNESCO, 1948] to paradigmatic status as a model for how to conduct adult biliteracy campaigns in third world countries .... The Tarascan Project established once and for all that indios - illiterate indigenous monolingual adults - could learn to read and write both their own language and the metropolitan language in less than a month or two - provided both languages were systematically coded in a single alphabet deliberately designed to be as hybrid as possible, on the principle of one letter, one hybrid phoneme."

http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j30/revews.php

4. Pronunciation changes through time, undermining the match between spelling and sound.

SB: See Webster quote

5. Spelling systems need modernizing periodically to restore the sound-spelling match.

SB: One of the arguments that Samuel Johnson gave for not matching spelling to speech was that speech changed to quickly. Had Johnson provided a dictionary pronunciation key it would be easy to see how much English has changed since 1755.

6. By not systematically modernizing over nearly 1,000 years, English spelling has lost touch with the alphabetic principle of spelling matching sound.

SB: Written English emerged from Middle Ages as a combined adaption of two vry distinc spelling systems: those of OE and Norman French. Added to these dispareate elements were imports from other languages: Scandanavian, then Latin, Renaissance Greek, followed by elements from other languages around the world. This mix made the phonographic basis of writing in English (the link between its sounds and its written symbols) less immediately apparent and militated against the possibility of assimilating all of the ingredients into a consistent whole. The resulting diversity were increased by the effects of changes in pronunciation, esp. the Great Vowel Shift in the 15c, in response to which there were few changes in spelling.

7. Neglect of the alphabetic principle makes English spelling exceptionally difficult.

8. The difficulty of English spelling wastes time and produces unacceptably low levels of literacy in English-speaking countries.

9. To improve literacy, English needs to modernise its spelling, as other languages do.

10 There are no quick or easy solutions. As a first step, the idea of "managing" English spelling, i.e. controlling it rather than letting it continue on its own arbitrary way, should be adopted.

stbett@...








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